Isn’t it funny how time flies? It doesn’t seem like ten years since I published my first book, but I recently passed that milestone. September 1, 2013, was when I published Acting on Faith, my first novel. I’ve come a long way since then, now with more than 50 books published. That journey, and the one in which I am still engaged, has taken my life in a different direction from anything I might have expected.

This past summer, I knew my anniversary was approaching. As the date approached, however, I was distracted by my mother’s failing health and all the attendant concerns that go with losing a parent. Thus, when the date came, my focus was on other matters, and did not even consider it. Only recently did I remember the significance of it, which led me to reflect on the past ten years, mixed with a bit of speculation about what will come in the next ten.

I have been writing since about the late 90s. My sister and I conceived of an idea for a fantasy fiction series, and we spent many years writing, revising, redoing, and ultimately rejecting what we had written. Through that experience, I discovered that I’m no good at writing a novel if I don’t have an outline. Since then, we took that old story, discussed its shortcomings and strengths, made massive changes, discarded about 600 pages of written material, and came up with an outline. It will eventually be written, as the outline has been gathering dust for the last several years. As soon as she gives me the go-ahead, I’ll start the series and pass it to her, then we’ll play literary tennis for however long it takes to write it.

In the intervening years, I wandered in the writing universe. I did a little technical writing (a very little) did a bit of blogging, wrote some fanfiction, and toyed with some ideas of my own. They say that ten thousand hours of activity will make you an expert. The reality is that people are all unique. Some take less and some take more time to acquire skills. Regardless, in those years I certainly put in the work and did much more than ten thousand hours.

What propelled me forward was my discovery not only of Pride and Prejudice but also of P&P fanfiction. Suddenly I had material I was interested in which was also not under copyright and could be published for others to enjoy and not specifically as fanfiction. It took me a little to reach that state. I wrote a few shorts and hooked up with Lelia Eye, and together we amassed some ideas and began to write stories together. Acting on Faith was one such story. I conceived of the idea in 2012 and began writing and posting it on a fanfiction site. Then, in the fall, I had the idea of completing it and giving it to my mother as a Christmas present. So, I finished writing it, did a bunch of editing, and eventually printed the entire thing out and enclosed it in a folder, setting it under the tree for my mother to find on Christmas morning. My sister still has that old 8.5×11-inch copy.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2013 that I began looking into self-publishing. I also looked at publishers, but given the incredible niche that is P&P based fiction, I learned it was better to publish myself. And the rest is history. Lelia and I put together a publishing imprint, and with my sister’s help, we got a logo and so on. And I put it on Amazon to the public on September 1. After a slow first few days, it began selling far more than I ever imagined it would.

Let me tell you a secret: publishing Acting on Faith did not make me millions. I know, shocking, isn’t it? But publishing that novel gave me the confidence that I could put material out that people would enjoy, and it opened new possibilities I had only dreamed of. At the time, I worked at a huge, soulless, multinational corporation, and I stuck it out until the spring of 2015. Then I had a conversation with my wife, and she (inadvertently, I believe, given her comments since) agreed that it was possible to make a living as a writer. It was a leap of faith in the purest sense of the word. I had no publishing contract, no guarantee I could write enough to make ends meet, let alone sucker enough people into buying my stuff. But I had faith, and I put my nose to the grindstone. The rest, as they say, is history. I left that corporation at the end of June 2015 and have never regretted it for a second.

That’s my story. Ten years later, I’m still going strong. Or at least I hope so!

As for the next ten years? Well, I expect that P&P will still be a large part of my life. I enjoy writing them and I have lots of ideas and more than three years’ worth of outlines prepared. I’ve long said I would like to get into other genres and I’m slowly working toward that end. Again, I have lots of ideas, but none of them are fleshed out at all. I have thought of writing cozy mysteries, I’ve loved fantasy fiction since I was a kid, I have a couple of ideas for dystopian futures, and I’ve got an idea for a contemporary story too. I’ve done some work on several of them, but I’ve not taken any very far. What I need to do is choose one or two, and knuckle down, and get them planned out. Of course, historical fiction and contemporary fiction are a little easier, I think, because the world is already around us. For fantasy fiction, you have to plan out people and societies, history, customs, potentially magic systems, and a whole host of other things. Either way, I hope the next ten years will see some branching out in my writing.